Land Rights of Women: A Study of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana States, India (original) (raw)
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This paper examines the importance of property rights in women’s empowerment in rural India. Arguments justifying the need for granting property rights to women are presented and the distinction is made between legal (formal) and customary (informal) rights. The ineffectiveness of legal right in absence of customary rights has been discussed. Customary rights also become ineffective due to other institutional impediments. These impediments have been discussed. The results of extensive field work in rural West Bengal and Orissa have been presented to illustrate the pattern of development process that poor rural women want and in which the property right is only one component, not the only component.
Property rights in women’s empowerment in rural India: a review
International Journal of Social Economics, 2002
This paper examines the importance of property rights in women’s empowerment in rural India. Arguments justifying the need for granting property rights to women are presented and the distinction is made between legal (formal) and customary (informal) rights. The ineffectiveness of legal right in absence of customary rights has been discussed. Customary rights also become ineffective due to other institutional impediments. These impediments have been discussed. The results of extensive field work in rural West Bengal and Orissa have been presented to illustrate the pattern of development process that poor rural women want and in which the property right is only one component, not the only component.
The Landesa Innovation in West Bengal: Strengthening Women's Land Rights Through Self Help Groups
ERN: Other Development Economics: Agriculture, 2021
Women agricultural producers, despite their significant participation and contribution to farming, are not recognized as farmers in official policy, and the society is not ready to accept them as farmers in their own right. Apart from the absence of their names in land records and poor legal awareness, women also suffer from gender biases in a patriarchal land administration and agricultural service environment. Interventions Building on an earlier partnership with the Land Revenue Department in West Bengal to provide land literacy training, Landesa, an international non-governmental organization (NGO), assisted the State Rural Livelihoods Mission to upscale land rights training for women’s self-help group (SHG) members and enhance their access to land related services and entitlements. This training enhanced women’s awareness of the land laws governing inheritance and on updating land records with women’s names. Trained local SHG leaders could digitally interact with the State port...
Securing Land Rights for Women Through Institutional and Policy Reforms
2013
Rural women suffer double discrimination because they are female and poor. Though women are the biggest food producers, they earn only one-tenth of the world's income and own less than 1% of the world's land. The Government of India has tried to provide land to women, but with limited results. The Government of Odisha, with the support of Landesa, developed a pilot program to identify vulnerable landless women and provide them with secure rights to land. The government and Landesa designed a pilot operating from the sub-district land administration office to implement a village household inventory identifying single women such as widows and abandoned women. The pilot also developed the capacities of government officials involved in implementation. As a result of the pilot, the government identified several legal and procedural hurdles to ensuring single women could access land of their own. The pilot has now been scaled to the entire district where out of 300,000 households, close to 15% will be eligible to get land from the government. Considering how this innovative pilot is shaping, the government is keen to scale it further to the entire state, which would mean close to 500,000 single women would get land.
Property Rights and Women's Empowerment in Rural India: The Community Perspective
Women and their rights towards education, gainful employment, basic amenities like drinking water and sanitation, housing, health and quality of living have gained greater recognition in the last quarter of the 20 th century. The impact of this change in the society's attitude and treatment of its women is clear in the present century when legislation is more effective in reaching the development benefits to women. Besides governmental initiatives for economic development and political mainstreaming of women in India, its legal Acts and Policies are no less significant. However, there is the need for the 'social recognition' of legal rights, especially so in the most radical rung of claiming equal share in father's property as their brothers. The present paper attempts to address the situation based on empirical data from a study on women and property rights in Karnataka. Its findings are discussed here with reference to the local community's reactions to the initiative and women's efforts to claim the right. Gender approach is adopted to reflect upon the responses of both men and women in the community who have highlighted the need for support organisations (like women's SHGs, local panchayats etc) to voice this right vehemently.
State initiatives for the empowerment of women of rural communities: experiences from eastern India
Women of rural communities in India are handicapped by entrenched caste, class and gender hierarchies, ethnic and religious discrimination as well as unequal distribution of resources. Poor women of rural communities adopt many creative strategies to cope with difficult and highly unequal situations. However, programmes taken up by the government for the empowerment of women of rural communities often fail to recognize these. This is mainly because while developing an analytical framework for examining empowerment, women's own definitions and understand-ings are seldom heard. This paper analyzes government-initiated development experiences of rural women in India. It is based on extensive fieldwork by the authors during 1995–2000 in the Burdwan district of West Bengal in eastern India where another research project on rural–urban interactions was ongoing. The field interviews culminated in an intensive group discussion well-attended by women of rural communities. Several cases were thoroughly dissected in this six-hour long focussed group discussion. Our intention is to bring forward women's own views and comments on government policies and development programmes for women of rural communities in a specific region. These views should be heard by decision-makers before policy formulation. We also highlight the successes and failures of such government programmes as seen by rural women in an exploration of possible alternatives emerging from these views.
Women's Land Rights and the Law: The Legislative Framework Governing Women's Land Rights in India
2017
The principle of gender equality is enshrined in the Indian Constitution in its Preamble, Fundamental Rights, Fundamental Duties and Directive Principles. There is a direct relationship between women's Right to land, economic empowerment, food security and poverty reduction. A gender approach to land rights can enable shifts in gender power Relations, and assure that all people, regardless of sex, benefit from, and are empowered by, Development policies and practices to improve People's rights to land. Although women play a key role in agricultural work and food production, their land rights are most tenuous. Much like those of women of any other country, property rights of Indian women have evolved out a continuing struggle between the status quo and the progressive forces. And pretty much like the Property rights of women elsewhere, property rights of Indian women too are unequal and unfair under different personal laws. Land governance in India is at a crossroads. This pa...
The state's 'eminent domain' provision under colonial Land Acquisition Act, 1894 is the major cause that forcefully dispossesses the peasantry of their major means of production, that is, land. Though it facilitates rapid industrialization, it has a severe impact on affected persons that often leads to socioeconomic impoverishment. Despite the existence of a significant number of studies on the relationship and impacts of development-forced displacement and resettlement in general, only a few studies focus on gender issues. Moreover, there is complete absence of studies on the consequences, which women face in the context of acquisition of agricultural land, where the affected persons are not physically relocated. Based on a micro-level field study, it tries to explore what the affected persons, particularly the women, do when the productive assets like agricultural lands have been acquired for private industries. Furthermore, it tries to examine whether there is any impact on the members of neighbouring families, particularly the women, whose lands have not been acquired. Analyzing the village-level data in an industrial zone of South Bengal, India, it is revealed that land acquisition forced the affected women to go outside for earning, thereby enhancing their position in the family in an agrarian environment. This positively affected the neighbouring women and made them engage in income-generating activities , breaking the cultural traditions of non-participation of women in outside work and patriarchal subjugation, prevalent in peasant societies of India.
Women Empowerment and Habitation of Land for Landless: An Empirical Analysis
This paper empirically analyzes the association between women empowerment and land question in urban localities in Andhra Pradesh in general and Ongole town in particular. I find a tentative congruence between women empowerment and habitation of owning land for landless at the extremes of the emerging Scheduled Caste Women empowerment notion in urban localities and slightly weakening in this association over time. Though the Scheduled castes in the urban localities have low upward mobility, higher castes are not entirely protected from down ward mobility.
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) of India is most progressive legislation enacted by parliament. This is the flagship program introduced by United Progressive Alliance Government and implemented by the Ministry of Rural Development with primary objective of providing livelihood security to rural poor of Below Poverty Line (BPL) families by providing them at least 100 days guaranteed unskilled manual work in a year. The Act has become the fact of life of rural poor and with the stipulation that 33 percent of the total work will be given to the women it provides the means to raise the socioeconomic status of the rural women from BPL families. In this paper by conducting a survey of rural areas of district Aligarh (Uttar Pradesh) and by the in-depth interview of women beneficiaries it is tried to find out that up to what extent MGNREGA is helpful for women empowerment by raising their standard of living through the provision of 100 days guaranteed employment. The paper also highlights the factors influencing the participation of women in the scheme and needs for assessment of institutional and governance system related to the implementation of the scheme particularly the ways through which employment opportunities are offered to women.